The assembly of the toolkit began with this video called, The Invisible Discriminator, from Stop. Think. Respect BeyondBlue. The Invisible Discriminator – YouTube
This is a powerful, multimodal tale that even the youngest students can understand what is being experienced by the silent characters in the film. It is up to the Teacher and the Teacher-Librarian to seize the moment and extend the learning experience further for students to delve into the deep world of social justice.
This short film is meant to be an awakening to the world of social justice – the issues many people of different cultures, faiths, and genders face in Canada and around the world. The prompt from module 11 asks how I would use this video with different age levels. I separated my approach into K/1 if the cohorts seem apt to handle the material, 2-5, and 6-7 as I work in the elementary system. Some colleagues may approach this lesson differently depending on their timetable. How I would address this video on social justice awareness is inspired from a lesson I found on the Learning for Justice website.
For K/1, and 2-5 students, I would begin with the title of the lesson, “The Invisible Discriminator”. I would ask students what the word “invisible” means to them. Can they provide examples from stories or shows? I would then ask if something were invisible does this mean it doesn’t exist? I would then explain that we are going to watch a short story that is fictional, but for many people who live in a country called Australia, is very real every day. Our job is to be detectives and watch for clues on the faces of the characters who don’t speak. We want to know what they are thinking and feeling, and then we want to reflect on how this makes us think and feel. I will then show them the chart I made to record our data, The Invisible Discriminator – Keeping Track of What We Know. I will then show the video but remind students that it is short, and they are to pay attention to the 4 silent characters and to watch their body language, their facial expressions, and how others are treating them. ** If doing this lesson with K/1 students, let them know the man in black is the “invisible voice” speaking unkind thoughts into the peoples’ heads. Teachers may then want to follow up with lessons curated from Sesame Workshop on Diversity, Race, and Identity.**
After watching the video, I ask students to help me record their observations in the chart. We discuss as a class how they felt after watching the video. Could they relate to, or have they seen anything similar to what they observed in the video in Canada? How did the experiences of these four people make them feel? We will end the lesson with a reflection. The reflection question asks students why is being aware of social justice matter and how all people are treated important to me?
The lesson for grades 6-7 will be the same however, given the age, the introduction/hook will be slightly different, and each student will be required to write their own responses. The hook used for this group will be the inquiry questions of, “Why would a story or video use a title of “The Invisible Discriminator?” What do you think is invisible in the video you are about to watch? How can anything that is invisible have any power over anyone?
Then explain this is what Social Justice addresses. It brings forth inequities peoples face that must be stopped in order for our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be upheld.
The next part of the learning log prompt suggested seeking out other online social justice content and assembling an online toolkit. For this, I went to my online bookmarking digital friend Symbaloo. 
I created a new group titled, Social Justice, which consists of 12 tabs that I and other teachers could explore with their students. Each tab takes the user to a site that deals with social justice content for elementary aged students. 
I would use these websites as research explorations with different age groups in the SLLC. Some sites such as the Facing History and Ourselves , and the collection of eBooks titled, “Righting Canada’s Wrongs” on the Teaching Books sites, is appropriate for grades 6 and beyond. Therefore, I would use sites such as The United Nations for Kids lessons, the three lessons curated in the Diversity Education Playlist tab on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Learning for Justice Lessons, and Education World lessons for examples of Social Justice for my younger aged students. For multimodal introductory videos, I would use the Social Justice videos tabs which has many short, animated videos for multi-aged students on the topic of social justice from the concept itself to identifying major players of the movement in history, etc. For a great selection of children’s books on social justice and racial identity, We Are Teachers has a curation of 25 kids’ books on the subject that I have included in my grouping.
Lastly, I included a unique tab for teachers to explore that isn’t so much about social justice awareness but extends the idea of social justice into the act of social justice by demonstrating acts of compassion and empathy. The tab, The Compassion Project, brings users to a site that is U.S.-based, but describes a project that is centered around students and teachers developing activities that encourage self-reflection, deep-thinking, and connectedness of self and others. Teachers may be inspired by the work of their U.S. colleagues and want to try some of the projects discussed on the site in their own classrooms. In the S.L.L.C. I could collaborate with teachers on Compassion projects with various divisions or with the school administrator and a team of teachers develop a school compassion project to accompany work being done on social justice.
The end result from this lesson, and series of lessons, is that students become aware of what social justice is, why it matters, and what ways we can contribute to making ourselves tolerant, compassionate citizens. To end, I would like to conclude with the video the Sesame Workshop uses to teach young children and their families about themselves, their identity, and their worth. If we all begin on this road, of awareness, think of what world we will have.
